Maths journals open up

“Cambridge University Press launched this month the online Forum of Mathematics journals and will bankroll them by waiving charges to authors for three years. Professor Tao, an expatriate Australian based at the University of California Los Angeles, is joined on the board by fellow Fields medallist Tim Gowers, whose blog post led to the "Cost of Knowledge'' boycott of commercial publisher Elsevier. The board embraces academics from well-known universities as well as mathematician Henry Kohn from Microsoft's Research New England lab. ‘The initial planning for this (CUP) journal happened to precede the Cost of Knowledge boycott, but the philosophy behind the journal is certainly aligned with that of the boycott, which I believe is further evidence that the time has come for mathematical journal reform,’ Professor Tao said on his blog. CUP said the new journals would follow ‘the same high levels of peer review process as traditional subscription journals’. Articles would be available free of charge online. The publication cost to authors would be in the order of £500-£700 pounds, modest by current standards. CUP is expected to seek philanthropic support to keep charges low.
Costs will be contained by offering print-on-demand only. Forum of Mathematics, Pi, would be a generalist journal, while Forum of Mathematics, Sigma, would be specialist, and papers in various fields of mathematics would be organised in clusters. The journals open for submissions on October 1. Professor Gowers, who holds the Rouse Ball chair of mathematics at Cambridge, said on his blog that he felt could not say no to an invitation to serve as editor. CUP's David Tranah approached him soon after the January blog post that inspired the Elsevier boycott, which has attracted more than 12,000 signatures. Professor Gowers said the new CUP journals were "potentially a very important development in the campaign for a better system of academic publishing. ‘It greatly weakens what was previously quite a strong argument for some people against participating in the Elsevier boycott: that the best specialist journal in their area is an Elsevier journal so joining the boycott would harm their career. It is of course unlikely that the Forum of Mathematics will change the face of mathematical publishing in three years. To be a serious direct threat to Elsevier's mathematics journals, for example, it would need to cause a reduction of their quality by enough to make libraries consider cancelling their subscriptions, which is very difficult when mathematics journals are bundled together with journals from other subjects. However, the Forum of Mathematics can still have a big influence. For one thing, it will demonstrate that a major publishing house can produce a high-quality journal with high-quality formatting and editing with (author publication charges) of around £500. I hope that people in charge of funding bodies who are considering open-access mandates will ask some tough questions of publishers who continue to charge four times that.’ The existence of the new journals also would strengthen the arm of university librarians in their negotiations with commercial publishers.”